[H]ard|OCP's testing was performed using an i7-3770K but for those looking at the G3258 or other lower priced processors their results will still hold true. As of this posting all three of these cards are within $15 of the $150 mark so even including taxes and shipping you can get your hands on one for less than $200. If you have a 1080p monitor and want the best bang for your buck, which card is the best choice? The results were not absolutely clear cut and your experience may vary depending on the overclock you can achieve but in the end one card stood out, see which one in their full review.

"Today we continue our quest at finding the best value for 1080p gaming at less than $200. We are looking at two video cards from ASUS, the R7 265 DirectCU II and the GTX 750 Ti DirectCU II OC. We will compare across a variety of 1080p gaming, and draw our conclusion on the best value between the R7 260X, R7 265, and GTX 750 Ti."

Some time in late February or March you will be able to purchase the R7 265 for around $150, a decent price for an entry level GPU that will benefit those who are currently dependent on the GPU portion of an APU. This leads to the question of its performance and if this Pitcairn refresh will really benefit a gamer on a tight budget. Hardware Canucks tested it against the two NVIDIA cards closest in price, the GTX 650 Ti Boost which is almost impossible to find and the GTX 660 2GB which is $40 more than the MSRP of the R7 265. The GTX 660 is faster overall but when you look at the price to performance ratio the R7 265 is a more attractive offering. Of course with NVIDIA's Maxwell release just around the corner this could change drastically.

Straddling the R7 and R9 designation

It is often said that the sub-$200 graphics card market is crowded. It will get even more so over the next 7 days. Today AMD is announcing a new entry into this field, the Radeon R7 265, which seems to straddle the line between their R7 and R9 brands. The product is much closer in its specifications to the R9 270 than it is the R7 260X. As you'll see below, it is built on a very familiar GPU architecture.

AMD claims that the new R7 265 brings a 25% increase in performance to the R7 line of graphics cards. In my testing, this does turn out to be true and also puts it dangerously close to the R9 270 card released late last year. Much like we saw with the R9 290 compared to the R9 290X, the less expensive but similarly performing card might make the higher end model a less attractive option.

Let's take a quick look at the specifications of the new R7 265.

Based on the Pitcairn GPU, a part that made its debut with the Radeon HD 7870 and HD 7850 in early 2012, this card has 1024 stream processors running at 925 MHz equating to 1.89 TFLOPS of total peak compute power. Unlike the other R7 cards, the R7 265 has a 256-bit memory bus and will come with 2GB of GDDR5 memory running at 5.6 GHz. The card requires a single 6-pin power connection but has a peak TDP of 150 watts - pretty much the maximum of the PCI Express bus and one power connector. And yes, the R7 265 supports DX 11.2, OpenGL 4.3, and Mantle, just like the rest of the AMD R7/R9 lineup. It does NOT support TrueAudio and the new CrossFire DMA units.

Radeon R9 270X

Radeon R9 270

Radeon R7 265

Radeon R7 260X

Radeon R7 260

GPU Code name

Pitcairn

Pitcairn

Pitcairn

Bonaire

Bonaire

GPU Cores

1280

1280

1024

896

768

Rated Clock

1050 MHz

925 MHz

925 MHz

1100 MHz

1000 MHz

Texture Units

80

80

64

56

48

ROP Units

32

32

32

16

16

Memory

2GB

2GB

2GB

2GB

2GB

Memory Clock

5600 MHz

5600 MHz

5600 MHz

6500 MHz

6000 MHz

Memory Interface

256-bit

256-bit

256-bit

128-bit

128-bit

Memory Bandwidth

179 GB/s

179 GB/s

179 GB/s

104 GB/s

96 GB/s

TDP

180 watts

150 watts

150 watts

115 watts

95 watts

Peak Compute

2.69 TFLOPS

2.37 TFLOPS

1.89 TFLOPS

1.97 TFLOPS

1.53 TFLOPS

MSRP

$199

$179

$149

$119

$109

The table above compares the current AMD product lineup, ranging from the R9 270X to the R7 260, with the R7 265 directly in the middle. There are some interesting specifications to point out that make the 265 a much closer relation to the R7 270/270X cards than anything below it. Though the R7 265 has four fewer compute units (which is 256 stream processors) than the R9 270. The biggest performance gap here is going to be found with the 256-bit memory bus that persists; the available memory bandwidth of 179 GB/s is 72% higher than the 104 GB/s from the R7 260X! That will definitely improve performance drastically compared to the rest of the R7 products. Pay no mind to that peak performance of the 260X being higher than the R7 265; in real world testing that never happened.